Abstract: We present a new shape skeleton pruning algorithm based on contour approximation and the integer medial axis. The algorithm effectively removes unwanted branches, conserves the connectivity of the skeleton and respects the topological properties of the shape. The algorithm is robust to significant boundary noise and to rigid shape transformations, it is fast and easy to implement. High accuracy reconstruction of the shape is possible from the generated skeleton by means of the integer medial axis transform. Our algorithm also produces a vector representation of the skeleton. We compare our algorithm with state-of-the-art techniques for computing stable skeleton representations of shapes including pruning. We test and compare our solution using the MPEG-7 CE Shape-1 Part B dataset looking for skeleton connectivity, complexity, parameter selection, and accuracy/quality of the outcome. The experimental results show that our solution outperforms existing solutions according to these criteria.